Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1965 and immediately attracted critical attention. Its publication helped save Jean Rhys from he obscurity had fallen after his previous novels, published between the First and Second World Wars, had gone out of print, Wide Sargasso Sea had won Rhys the esteemed WH Smith Award and the Heinemann Award, and had earned her a place in the literary canon that the novel seeks to recreate the "true" story of Bertha Mason, Edward Rochester's mad Creole wife in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Rhys explores the complex relationships between India's old slave families western, black and white West Indians, and the new English settlers in the post-emancipation Caribbean Rhys attempts to correct what he saw as Brontë's injustice by telling the story of Bertha Mason (referred to in most of Wide Sargasso Sea as Antoinette Cosway). , Rhys writes in his notes that he "discovered what a fat (and unlikely) monster [Bertha Mason] was." He believed that Brontë "took her horrible Bertha from [a] legend [so she is] entitled to take her lost Antoinette." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Set primarily in Jamaica and Dominica, Rhys' home country, Wide Sargasso Sea describes how Antoinette became the "madwoman in the attic," Bertha Mason, of Jane Eyre. In Brontë's novel, Bertha is a monster, described as violent, mad and promiscuous: "she crawled, apparently, on all fours; she grabbed and snarled like a strange wild animal: but she was covered with clothes; and a quantity of dark hair, grizzled, wild as a mane, hid her head and face" In this description of Bertha, Brontë makes the boundary between human and animal as well as between male and female indeterminate; Bertha's gender is lost in Jane's description and is replaced by the neuter pronoun "it."In nineteenth-century England, the very existence of such a "strange wild animal" would have all but eliminated Jane's hope of marrying Mr. Rochester in spirit as well as in law his lack of humanity and subsequent inability to react socially with the other characters, that Jane Eyre's Bertha is not much more than a plot device, serving to present a legal barrier to Mr. Rochester's marriage to Jane while weakening the his social position in the community. In rather stark contrast, Rhys creates a vulnerable young woman that readers pity, trying, unsuccessfully, to adapt to a new world in which old inequalities and prejudices are suddenly upended to make her a "white cockroach." She is told to "go away, go away. Nobody wants you." The themes explored in the novel – particularly those of race relations between newly freed slaves and their former owners and the status of women – attracted critical attention. . Some critics debate the merits of the novel, saying that it relies too much on Jane Eyre and cannot hold its own. Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea that it is "in no way a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and exists in its own right, entirely independent of Jane Eyre". This, however, would appear to be contradicted by Rhys's notes, in which he shows that he accepts the existence of Jane Eyre as essential to the functioning of his novel. In fact he seems only too aware of what he would lose by "parting from Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester - All too well. (Really can I?) Names? Dates?" Certainly, Wide Sargasso Sea forces readers to reexamine Jane Eyre andlet us consider the meaning of race in the nineteenth-century English novel. There are, in fact, three characters in Rhys's novel who are directly related to three in Brontë's: Edward Rochester, Bertha Mason and Grace Poole. Rochester remains nameless throughout the second part of Wide Sargasso Sea, referred to only as "that man" or "my husband". In this complex relationship between a novel and its prequel, names establish a clear link; Rochester's anonymity in Wide Sargasso Sea highlights the implicit importance of his character and lends greater authority to his narrative. The implication that he is the narrator of the second part, combined with the circumstance that occurs in both novels involving a substantial sum of money changing hands in the marriage of a Creole, demonstrate a clear link between the two Rochesters. The last name of Bertha's stepfather and half-brother (originally Antoinette) is "Mason" in Wide Sargasso Sea, linking her character in both first and last name to Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason. Antoinette refers to her "carer" as Grace Poole - the name of Bertha's caretaker in Jane Eyre. In this essay, Grace Poole only serves as further evidence to support the connection between the novels, as readers feel neither pity nor anger towards her character. Although Rhys states only that he wanted to give Bertha a voice and a story, "I had material for the story of Mr. Rochester's first wife. The real story - as it might have been", there is no doubt that Wide Sargasso Sea has evolved in part into a full prequel to Jane Eyre. The prequel to Jane Eyre was published long after the publication of Brontë's novel in 1847. Due to the long interval between publications, it is obvious that the two authors did not communicate with each other, and even if some collaboration had been considered desirable, which is doubtful in light of Rhys's notes, would have been impossible. We must remember that Jane Eyre was written long before the Great Sargasso Sea and consequently I assume that was Rhys' intention all along. begin for readers to read Jane Eyre before her novel. After all, there is no doubt that Jean Rhys created his novel as a prequel to Brontë's. I think it's important to read Jane Eyre before its prequel, as Wide Sargasso Sea's savage portrayal of the ruthless Mr. Rochester - "Don't cry, either. Crying won't do with him" - would undoubtedly have cast an ominous shadow. to Jane Eyre's thoughtful and empathetic Mr. Rochester: "Oh, Jane, how did I feel when I found you had run away from Thornfield... What could my darling do, I asked, left destitute and penniless?" Inevitably, Bertha Mason's unsympathetic view in Jane Eyre would be softened by her empathetic performance in Wide Sargasso Sea. Due to the fact that the two novels present such contrasting views of Bertha and Mr. Rochester, it is not possible to achieve consonance between the their contrasting descriptions. Cognitive dissonance ensues and you find yourself torn, unable to decide which of the seemingly opposing character descriptions to believe; Readers' sympathies tend to lie with the clueless Mr. Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, while readers of Wide Sargasso Sea tend to sympathize with the wrongfully imprisoned Bertha. It is not possible for readers to feel sympathy for both characters at the same time, since the two characters cannot both be victims. In my opinion, a satisfying consonance can only be achieved if you separate the characters to the extent that they are unique to the respective novel, thus detaching them completely from their partners. Whether the characters in the two novels are actually similar is indisputable. However, it is not inevitable thata character in one of them influences the reader's opinion of his equivalent in the novel's partner once the reader comes to accept that the characters are unique in their own right. Of course, mentally separating characters from their partners is possible. , and indeed necessary to avoid unresolvable cognitive dissonance. However, perhaps this is not entirely desirable; The wide Sargasso Sea may partially lose its underlying essence if a complete separation of characters is achieved, as Rhys documents its creation generated by his need to satisfy a need.apparent void left in Jane Eyre; she felt that Brontë did not give the "madwoman in the attic" a sufficiently complete portrayal to make her a convincing character. Being herself a descendant of a Creole mother, it is more than possible that she found it an insult that Bertha was described only according to the stereotype of the nineteenth-century 'mad Creole heiress': "But I, reading it later, and often, was irritated by the his portrait of the madman of the 'paper tiger', with the Creole scenes completely wrong" This note, written by Rhys a year before the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, suggests a personal, and almost unique, anger towards Brontë's portrait Bertha in Jane Eyre, which he may have felt helped justify his claim to use the Bertha Mason character; to 'right' a Brontë racial injustice. Rhys successfully explores complex themes of social relationships in Wide Sargasso Sea in a way that is not possible in Jane Eyre. However, I don't believe, like you, that it was necessary to use the best-known characters of a famous novel to carry out such an exploration. In fact, he wrote in his notes that "It's that particular crazy creole I want to write about, not any of the other crazy creoles." It is possible to argue that Rhys perhaps feigned such charm to try to justify to us, or perhaps to herself, why she compared her key characters to those of Jane Eyre. It is conceivable that her singular motive in forming the analogies was to save herself from the obscurity into which she had collapsed by launching The Great Sargasso Sea off the back of an already famous novel; obviously there would be no objections from the author of Jane Eyre. Apart from the clearly comparable traits of the main characters of the two novels, there are other equally convincing differences; these differences arise not from the characters' differences in behavior, but from the not-so-obvious differences in the characters' speech style. More than a hundred years had passed between the publications of the two novels, resulting in clear cultural changes. Throughout the nineteenth century, imperialism was an undercurrent of almost all British literature. Wide Sargasso Sea was published more than twenty years after World War II, a war that ended the era of imperialism. It was written in the era of the American civil rights movement, in which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, raising the esteem of the black population within the white American community. Mr. Rochester describes his sojourn in the West Indies, one of the nineteenth-century camps of imperial conquest, as hell: "One night I had been awakened by his screams...it was a fiery West Indian night...'This life 'I said finally, 'this is the air, these are the sounds of the bottomless abyss.' .. A fresh wind from Europe blew over the ocean and broke through the open window: the storm burst, poured, thundered, blazed, and the air became pure... It was true Wisdom that consoled me in that now, and showed me the lineaway... The gentle wind from Europe still whispered among the freshened leaves, and the Atlantic thundered in glorious freedom... 'Go,' said Hope, 'and live in Europe again... You have done all that God and humanity require of you. mountains and hills, rivers and rain. I hated sunsets of any color, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated her indifference and the cruelty that was part of her beauty. And above all I hated her." Even if their feeling is the same, the intervening hundred years have left a clear mark on the attitude of both towards this hell and the speech style of the Rochester of the Great Sargasso Sea. Rhys is known for her technical style by Francis Wyndham in the introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea: "What struck me on the technical side... was the singular instinct for form possessed by this young woman, an instinct for form possessed by singularly few writers Englishmen and almost no English women writers." However, English grammar evolved over those hundred years in accordance with the culture in which it was used. Inevitably, then, Rhys's Rochester's description of his hatred of his surroundings does not carries neither the imperialist undertone of British superiority nor the old-fashioned looseness of style common to nineteenth-century authors. Comparing these two passages, presumably spoken by the same person, Rochester's Wide Sargasso Sea sounds childish ("I hated... I hated. ... I hated... I hated... I hated") compared to Jane Eyre's Rochester's proficiency with language ("'This life,' I said at last, 'is hell! This is the air, these are the sounds of the abyss!"). Whether a person expresses himself implicitly or explicitly is an individual tendency towards himself. Throughout the novel, Jane Eyre's Rochester implicitly expresses his hatred, while Wide Sargasso Sea's Rochester explicitly expresses his hatred five times in one passage. This is due to Jane Eyre's Rochester's markedly superior control over language, which allows him to more subtly express his emotions while achieving a equal, if not greater, impact than its partner in Wide Sargasso Sea. I argue that these passages alone serve as evidence of sufficient weight to negate the possibility that the two Rochesters are one and the same , he justifies the need for a move beyond the laws of marriage as a divine injunction rather than a human reason on this flight back to England The indication of a divine injunction (“I have the right to get rid of it if I can… [I have ] done all that God and mankind require of [me]") is entirely absent in The Wide Sargasso Sea; human motivation is evidently the only driving force ("I hated the mountains... I hated her") of this Rochester. It is possible that during the period of time between the settings of the two novels, Mr. Rochester's fury and clarity have cooled somewhat with age. However, he is still an adult in the Great Sargasso Sea whose language was already fully developed; I find it unlikely and unconvincing, probably to a greater extent than Rhys believed the existence of Jane Eyre's Bertha was, that the language of the young Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea evolved with his age into the language demonstrated by Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester Eyre. While a comparison can easily be made between the language and behaviors of the two Rochesters, such a comparison is much more difficult to make between the two Berthas, mainly due to the Bertha of Jane Eyre's lack of dialogue. Parts one and two of Wide Sargasso Sea take up the majority of Rhys' novel, telling the story of the young.